Next For The Retail Omni Market

As discussed previously the velocity of change is increasing in all practices that support the retail omni market and the velocity of these changes will only increase and the types and span of changes across practices will only increase.  The ability to sense and respond to these changes is important for all of the practices and the next frontier for the retail omni market is the coordination and implementation of these changes and especially the ability to sense change demands and coordinate across practices. The coordination will require the collaboration across practices in a manner that provides a control tower concept of consolidation and communication across the practices and partners.  This is the next frontier for the retail omni market, it is not any specific change in any specific practice, rather it is the coordination and communication across practices that will be the next frontier.

The industry leaders have done a great job in sensing and responding to change in their individual practices to meet the new demands and these leaders have transformed their individual practices to provide a means to not only meet the current demands but also provide the framework and foundation to provide a flexible means to meet new demands.  The challenge now for the next generation of transformation is the collaboration across practices to coordinate the response across the market and practices supporting the market. None of these practices supporting the retail omni market can succeed alone in the future and that is why the leaders’ next step is to improve and extend their collaborative efforts and coordinate these effort through a robust control tower framework to support these efforts.

The challenge as I see it with this control tower concept to coordinate and enhance the collaboration is the ownership of the framework.  I really don’t see any individual partner supporting the retail omni market as willing to give up the type of control and valued information that is part of this framework.  As I see this there is a new opportunity for partners across the practices supporting the retail omni market to share information from individual partner control tower frameworks and collaborate on the analysis and the support of the demands across the entire retail omni market.  This means both stepping up the collaborative practices among and across partners along with a method to efficiently and quickly share and connect large volumes of data across the network.

The tools and capabilities are available to collect, store and share large volumes of data across distributed networks to create a distributed control tower strategy and framework that allows partners to tap into these disparate data structures to improve the accuracy and value of the analysis of demands and opportunities.  This next frontier of a distributed control tower is the next logical extension of a big data concept that begins to take advantage of data collected to support analytic practices in each practice supporting the market in a manner that brings a new understanding and also allows the partners in the retail omni market collaboratively develop new solutions that will bring the next transformation to the retail marketplace.